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Child's Play:
Pretending to be Psychic

March 9, 2009. A few months ago, I
wrote about a new piece of
exploitainment on
A&E called
Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal. The kids were being vetted
by
Dr. Lisa J.
Miller, associate professor of psychology
and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and
Chip Coffey, who bills himself as a
psychic and a
medium. Coffey's greatest claim
to fame is that he appeared in another A&E paranormal pandering effort
called Paranormal State, which features the ghostbusting
investigations of some critical thinking-challenged college students from
Penn State University.

One of the children featured on the program was
Dalton Kropp. I urge you to look
at his website. This kid is slick. [update Jan 3, 2015: the website is gone, but there is now a Dalton Kropp Fanclub website.] (Then check out the
website of this Australian
mother and daughter team. That website, too, is gone, but the mother, Jodiann Poynten, self-published a book featuring her daughter, Emily, as an eight-year-old psychic. Well, the kid hears voices and the mother interprets this to mean the child is getting messages from the dead. The book is called Emily & the Magic Wish: The Journey Begins. Good luck in finding a copy.) That Dalton could dupe Coffey is not a great
feat, but many people might think that it would be difficult to dupe Dr.
Miller, who has a
B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
She lists as her first scholarly interest "religion &
spirituality." If that's not a red flag, it's at least an
acceptable segue into the
next paragraph.

In 1882, Sir William Fletcher Barrett, a professor of physics at the Royal
College of Science in Dublin, and a few friends, including the Cambridge
philosopher Henry Sidgwick, formed the still-existing
Society for Psychical
Research (SPR). To those who doubted the reality of spirits and psychics,
the SPR proclaimed that they would prove the doubters wrong with scientific
evidence. According to Sidgwick, the goal of the SPR was to

drive the objector into the position of being forced either to admit the
phenomena as inexplicable, at least by him, or to accuse the investigators
either of lying or cheating or of a blindness or forgetfulness incompatible
with any intellectual condition except absolute idiocy.

SPR’s first scientific study would have Sidgwick eating those words.
The scene has been repeated many times: brilliant scientists who think they
can't be duped are not only duped, they are duped by children.

Barrett led SPR’s first study (1882-1888). It involved a clergyman’s four
teenage daughters and a servant girl. They claimed they could communicate
telepathically. Barrett introduced a method for testing telepathy that was
popular for more than a century, though it is rarely used anymore by
scientific investigators: card guessing. He did a number of guessing
experiments (of cards or names of persons or household objects) with the
girls and came away declaring that the odds of their being able to guess
correctly in one experiment “were over a million to one.” The odds of their
guessing correctly five cards in row were “over 142 million to one” and
guessing correctly eight consecutive names in a row were “incalculably
greater” (Christopher 1970: 10). More men of integrity with high degrees
were brought in to witness the telepathic powers of the Creery girls and
Jane Dean, their servant. All the scientists agreed that there was no
trickery involved. How did they know? They had looked very carefully for
signs of it and couldn’t find any!

A skeptic might ask: What are the odds that children can fool some very
intelligent scientists for six years? The answer is: 100%.
Almost immediately the scientists were criticized for being taken in by
tricks amateurs could perform. It took six years for these rather
intelligent men of the SPR to catch the girls cheating—using a verbal
code—and discover their trickery. But that’s not all. While one group of
scientists was validating the Creery group, another from SPR was validating
the amazing telepathic feats of a 19-year-old entertainer named George A.
Smith and his partner in deception, Douglas Blackburn. Smith eventually
became secretary of the SPR (Christopher 1970). Had Blackburn not eventually
published a series of articles explaining how they fooled the scientists,
the world might never have known the details of the trickery (Gardner 1992).
The early scientific studies demonstrate the naïveté of the experimenters
and the need for experts to help them set up protocols to prevent cheating:
experts in non-verbal communication and deception, namely,
conjurors, gamblers, or psychologists with expertise in the field of
deception.

It took some time to sink in, but eventually the experimenters realized that
for some reason human beings like to deceive each other. They use all kinds
of non-verbal signals to communicate, which can give the appearance of
psychic transmission of information. They use glances (up, down, right, left
for the four suits of a deck of cards, for example), coughs, sighs, yawns,
and noises with their shoes. Other cheaters use Morse code with coins and
various other tricks known to conjurers. Sometimes gestures to various parts
of the body have a prearranged meaning.

Creery-girl and Smith-Blackburn stories are
frequent in the literature on psi research. One of the more famous cases is
rather recent: the Project Alpha fiasco.

From 1979 to 1983, physics professor Peter Phillips did
experiments on psychokinesis (mental spoon bending) at Washington
University in St. Louis. However, he was the victim of a hoax,
code-named
Project Alpha. The hoax involved James Randi, Steve Shaw (a.k.a.
Banachek), and Mike Edwards. Randi trained two young
mentalists/magicians—Banachek was 18 and Edwards 17 when the project
began—to fake psychic powers while being investigated in a serious
scientific setting. Randi
trained Banachek and Edwards so well that out of 300 applicants they
alone were selected as subjects. They were able to fool the
scientists for four years through more than 160 hours of experiments
on their paranormal powers.

Randi
wrote:

Though I had specifically warned
Phillips against allowing more than one test object (spoon or key,
for example) to be placed before a subject during tests, the lab
table was habitually littered with objects. The specimens were not
permanently marked, but instead bore paper tags attached with
string loops. Banachek and Edwards found it easy to switch tags
after the objects had been accurately measured, thus producing the
illusion that an object handled in the most casual fashion had
undergone a deformation (Randi: 1983a).

Phillips
and his lab assistants became convinced the boys had psychic powers. In 1981, they
took a videotape of the Banacheck/Edwards sessions to a convention
of the American Parapsychological Association. Their colleagues at the
convention are said to have laughed at the video and noted numerous
weak spots in their protocols.

Soon
afterward the McDonnell folks began instituting protocols that had
been suggested by Randi. Almost simultaneously they found that the
boys seemed to have lost their ability to produce psychic effects.
It was at this point that the boys were dismissed and Randi made the
hoax public. Randi’s take on the project after it was completed was

If Project Alpha resulted in
Parapsychologists (real parapsychologists!) awakening to the fact
that they are able to be deceived, either by subjects or
themselves, as a result of their convictions and their lack of
expertise in the arts of deception, then it has served its
purpose. Those who fell into the trap invited that fate; those who
pulled back from the brink deserve our applause (Randi: 1983b).

Twenty
years later Randi observed that “the effect of Alpha didn’t last
long” (personal correspondence). This exposé, like many others
before it, has had little impact on the parapsychological community.
Rather than thank skeptics for vividly demonstrating how easy it is
for very intelligent, highly trained professionals to be fooled by
conjurers and tricksters, they ignore the skeptics. Or worse, they accuse them of
“offensive incredulity.”

ghosts and kids

Experienced
investigators like James Randi, Milbourne Christopher, and
Joe Nickel
have caught a few ghosts in their day, ghosts that turned out to be
teenagers making asses out of adults. Nickel writes of investigating
poltergeists ("noisy spirits"):

Typically, small objects
are hurled through the air by unseen forces, furniture is
overturned, or other disturbances occur—usually by a juvenile
trickster determined to plague credulous adults. Unfortunately, in
many instances the adults prohibit knowledgeable investigators from
becoming involved (e.g., Randi, 1985). However, where such cases are
properly investigated by magicians and detectives using such tactics
as installing hidden cameras, using or threatening the use of lie
detectors, or dusting objects with tracer powders, they usually turn
out to be the pranks of children, teenagers, or immature adults.*

Christopher relates several poltergeist investigations that
turned out to be the work of bored or agitated adolescents and adults. One
group of four youngsters was asked why they had terrorized a teacher and the
children attending their rural schoolhouse in North Dakota. "They admitted
that when they had found their teacher and their parents so gullible, so
easy to mystify, they thoroughly enjoyed the excitement and the publicity
their pranks had provoked" (Christopher 1970: 149). In 1958, when
Christopher offered to investigate the so-called "Seaford
poltergeist," the father (James Hermann) in the house where bottles
seemed to be popping spontaneously said he would not allow
"charlatans, mystics, mediums, or magicians" in his home.
Christopher was a magician. In fact, at the time he was the
president of the Society of American Magicians. The Hermanns had a
12-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl at the time. Since he would
not be allowed in the house to investigate, Christopher invited the
press to his own house where he did six demonstrations that
duplicated what was going on in the Hermann household.

J. G.
Pratt, a paranormal investigator who was allowed in the Hermanns'
home, also visited Christopher at his home. While there, "a china
figurine leapt from a bookcase shelf and landed some eight feet
away." Pratt knew it was magic, but he couldn't figure out the
trick. For those interested in more details, I suggest you read
Christopher's delightful and enlightening book
ESP, Seers & Psychics: what the occult really is. He
notes that some items that people think move on their own are
actually thrown. People often think they see what they did not actually see.
And we are ill-equipped to locate the precise direction of a sound (because
of the design of our outer ear, see New Scientist, "Animal superpowers,"
24/31 December 2005).

In 1984, Tina Resch was 14 years old and living in Columbus, Ohio. Newspaper reports
testified to her chaotic household where telephones would spontaneously fly, lamps would
swing and fall, all accompanied by loud noises.
James Randi
studied the case and concluded that Tina was hoaxing
her adoptive parents and using the media attention to assist her quest to
find her biological parents.

A video camera from a visiting TV crew that was
inadvertently left running, recorded Tina cheating by surreptitiously
pulling over a lamp while unobserved. The other occurrences were shown to be
inventions of the press or highly exaggerated descriptions of quite
explainable events. (Randi 1995).

Dr. Rory Coker, Professor of Physics at the
University of Texas at Austin, puts it this way:

Parents, law-enforcement officers and
reporters spend their time looking for the “haunts” and marveling at the
“spirit manifestations,” never paying any attention to where little Timmy or
Tish happen to be or what he or she is actually doing. Investigators have
witnessed teenagers leaning into a doorway and tossing a plate directly at
their seated, distracted parents. The parents look up to see a plate in
mid-air moving rapidly toward them, with nobody around. The child is already
halfway back to his room by the time the plate strikes the wall, ready to
pretend to be asleep or to cry out, “What happened, Ma?” as the mood
strikes. It is an easy way to get your name and picture in the papers, and
an easy way to give you and your friends a real opportunity to snicker
justifiably at the stupidity of adults. Newspapers and TV news programs find
ample space and time for brain-dead reporting on the inexplicable wonders of
the latest poltergeist manifestation, but when the kid is caught red-handed
in the act, that fact is somehow never considered newsworthy. The case is
left a total mystery, as far as news media are concerned.*

training today's kid
psychics

Today's
children have been able to learn cold
reading tricks by watching characters like
John Edward, Sylvia Browne, and James Van
Praagh on television. The tricks of the
psychics are available for anyone to
see. The Internet, including
sites like mine, provide kids and adults with lessons in
warm and hot reading as well. While
I've provided a lengthy discussion of how
subjective validation
works in cold reading so that readers might avoid being duped by a
psychic, the same material can be used by anyone wishing to improve
their skills at pretending to be psychic. (See Michael Shermer's "Psychic
for a Day," where he describes pretending to be psychic using
what he learned from Ian Rowland's book on cold reading.)

Returning
to Dalton Kropp, the child psychic featured on A&E. I'm not saying
he learned his craft by watching Larry King or Montel Williams, or
shows like "Crossing Over" or "Medium." I'm not saying he learned
his trade by reading Internet sites or books on cold reading. Nor am
I saying that he's a trickster. If he is, then his father, a carpenter,
seems to be in on the game, unless a correspondent who spent an
evening with the two is putting me on. I received an
e-mail from someone who, with a friend, spent some time with the Kropps and found them to be "the real deal." My correspondent started
her first e-mail to me with: "This is not meant for publication, but
I need to dispel your doubts about Dalton Kropp and his family. I do
not know about the wife but the father (Larry) and Dalton are the
real deal." I have no idea why she thought it important to dispel me
in particular about Dalton. Perhaps she knew I would write about it
despite her disclaimer, thereby giving up some free publicity to the
kid. Anyway, she goes through a laundry list
of items that Dalton and his father told her about herself and her
friend. Of course, these were things they already knew about
themselves, but it impressed her. She concluded by saying she is a
great skeptic, these guys knew nothing about us, yet everything they
said was true. The icing on the cake, I guess, was to let me know
that Dalton had been checked out "by the people at Columbia
University who specialize in that area and they judged him authentic
also." I guess my correspondent hadn't read my little piece on
"Crazy
Therapies and Psychic Kids," where I write "no one in his right mind should trust Columbia
professor
Dr.
Lisa J. Miller" when it comes to investigating psychics.

It was suggested that I
arrange a meeting with Dalton and his family. Fat chance. I live in
California and the Kropps live in Illinois. Anyway, I'd be very
surprised if they'd let me in the house. My sixth sense (i.e.,
crap detector) tells me
that the Kropps are like
the McCleods and
that Dalton has been prepped to be another
Adam Dreamhealer. Adam
claims that things used to fly out of his hands, but now he channels
that energy into healing people's cancers and other ailments. In
2006,
ABC News estimated that Adam would make more than $1 million
that year, not including the income from his books, DVDs, and $150
healing sessions he offers over the Internet.

Maybe if I ask nicely I
can become Dalton's agent.

update (27 March 2009): I received an e-mail from Dalton's
father, Larry Kropp. It appears my crap detector has let me down.
The Kropps seem to really believe in Dalton's psychic abilities and
Mr. Kropp claims they've made no money as psychics. He even said I'd
be welcome in his home. To demonstrate Dalton's devotion to others,
Mr. Kropp shared the following story:

I am sure you were not
aware of the fact this boy has devoted time to missing persons, most
recently one that had him up at 5 am every morning to walk and
search through woods, fields, marshes, some very harsh terrain,
walking up to 11 miles a day, getting home at 1:00 am only to be
back up at 5:00am and start again. This trip cost him and myself
about 1,000 dollars. He requested nothing in the line of payment.
This is a 16-year-old boy. You find me one with that kind of heart
and devotion. The boy would be so exhausted, he would fall asleep
while eating lunch. So, I guess you don't know all you thought you
did.

Sounds like a dedicated
kid, but I don't see what this has to do with his alleged psychic
abilities.

In the meantime, I am
pursuing the possibility of having a knowledgeable skeptic meet with
the Kropps. [update 1/4/2015: I had no luck with finding anyone willing to meet with the Kropps. I've searched my email archives and must have deleted the correspondence with Larry Kropp. In 2009, the Kropps were in Danville, Illinois.]